News

Bruce Schneier, in his blog Schneier on Security http://www.schneier.com/ drew attention to this great interview with an ex-Nigerian-419 scammer on the Scam-Detective site. It’s a fairly long piece and gives a pretty good view of the Nigerian scam industry run by organized crime, how it sucks in young people who have good computer and English skills and pays them a huge amount of money ($75,000 per year in this case) to scam victims they view as white, greedy and rich. ...

Fake antivirus software (a.k.a misleading applications or rogue antivirus) is big business nowadays with Symantec reporting 43 million installation attempts from over 250 distinct programs between July 1, 2008, to June 30, 2009. With fake AV software costing the victim anywhere from $30 to $100, this is a lucrative earner for criminals. Over time Symantec has observed various social engineering tactics being used to try and entice victims to hand over their money in this scam. The fake antivirus software known as Live PC Care has now gone as far as offering live online support to potential victims. Once a victim has installed Live PC Care onto their system via a system exploit or social engineering tactics, they are presented with the screen below falsely informing them that their system is riddled with viruses. Any suspicious computer user might wonder what this software is and where exactly it came from. To alleviate doubt and to aid with the whole scam, the designers of Live PC Care have added a yellow online support button in the top, right-hand corner of the fake AV software. ...

When you spend your day scouring the Internet (and my blog 😉) for news about computer security topics you cover a lot of territory. Once in a while you just have a weird day. You run into a lot of strange stuff. Today is one of those days. Yahoo’s tech blog is carrying a story about a man in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who is suing because he has “electromagnetic sensitivity” and can’t live in his own home because of the radiation from his neighbor’s wi-fi network. ...

🙂 (Mashable) — We’ve just confirmed with Google that the company has signed an agreement to acquire social search engine Aardvark. Google isn’t disclosing the terms, but news of the acquisition was first reported by TechCrunch, who put the figure at around $50 million. Google told us that it’s “signed an agreement to acquire Aardvark but don’t have any additional details to report at this time.” Aardvark is a relatively new startup from former Googlers that uses social distribution channels to get immediate answers to your questions. ...

SAN FRANCISCO – Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks. The attack can force heavily secured computers to spill documents that likely were presumed to be safe. This discovery shows one way that spies and other richly financed attackers can acquire military and trade secrets, and comes as worries about state-sponsored computer espionage intensify, underscored by recent hacking attacks on Google Inc. ...

(CNET) — Who could resist the months of hype that paved the way for Apple’s iPad debut last week? Apparently not Google, which has shown its interest in tablet computing with its browser-based Chrome OS. On Monday, Glen Murphy, a user interface designer for Google’s Chrome browser and the Chrome operating system based on it, pointed to image and video concepts of a Chrome OS-based tablet that went live two days before the iPad launch. Apparently nobody noticed initially, because only now did Murphy tweet, “Apparently our tablet mocks have been unearthed.” The site also shows the array of devices Google envisions for Chrome OS. “While its primary focus is Netbooks, Chrome OS could eventually scale to a wide variety of devices. Each would have vastly different input methods, available screen space, and processing power,” according to the Chromium form factors site. Chromium is the name of the open-source developer project that underlies the branded Chrome product. It’s possible that Chrome OS could be an easier sell on tablets than on Netbooks, the class of device on which Google said it plans to launch Chrome OS. Netbooks often are used as general-purpose PCs, so the browser-based philosophy of Chrome OS is a more jarring transition. Today’s tablets, in contrast, tend to focus more on a collection of specialized uses such as reading books, surfing the Net, and chores that only require light typing. With that approach, Chrome OS’ break from the PC world could be less jarring. The tablet market isn’t as big as the Netbook market, though. The ideas are only mock-ups, but Google has established itself as a real if not dominant force in the computing industry. Its Android mobile-phone operating system is increasingly influential, and its Chrome browser continues to steadily grow in usage. The tablet mock-ups show a variety of Chrome OS tablet ideas, including a virtual keyboard taking up the bottom half of the screen or detached and floating as a separate window. Also included are a slideshow mode, an application launcher, sidebar-mounted browser tabs, and a pop-up contextual menu. The video mock-up shows a much larger tablet, with hands resizing and moving windows through the multitouch interface, scrolling through text, and typing a search query. It’s all very rough at this stage, but none of it is too remote from a multitouch-enabled version of the Chrome OS. Google plans to debut Chrome OS in Netbooks later this year, and development of the open-source operating system is well under way. In a statement, Google didn’t share any specifics about its plans: “Google Chrome OS is still in development, and we are constantly experimenting with various user interfaces to determine what designs would produce the best user experience. As we’ve said all along, the UI is still under development and will continue to evolve as we determine which designs work best for our users.” Computing companies have been trying to make tablets for years, with little success. Apple hopes its design will change that with its iPad selling from $499 to $829. It’s more of an iPhone with a large screen than a MacBook with no keyboard. Google is taking a different approach with Chrome OS. Instead of programs running straight on the computer’s hardware and its underlying Linux operating system, Chrome OS applications run directly in the browser. What’s similar to the iPad, though, is that both have somewhat of an applications head start compared with a computing platform that’s starting from scratch: the iPad can run existing iPhone apps, and Chrome OS can run existing Web applications such as Google Docs. One thing that’s changed since early tablet years is the arrival of e-book readers as a real phenomenon. Amazon’s Kindle is the most notable example, but there are others, and Apple touted book reading with the iPad. Google, it should be noted, has a conduit to millions of books via its Google Books service. Given that Apple chose to use a variation of its iPhone OS for the iPad, it’s interesting but not terribly surprising that Google chose to use Chrome OS rather than its phone operating system, Android. In the big picture, Google clearly hopes the browser will be the foundation for applications, letting them run more easily on a multitude of devices. Android uses a variation of Oracle’s Java technology as a program foundation. Perhaps ironically, Java was launched with the motto for programmers of “write once, run anywhere,” and it is that vision Google is trying to realize with Web applications. ...

Google has confirmed that it’s future operating system Chrome OS will have an integrated media player that will offer basic codec support , so that users can directly play audio or video files from Gmail or from USB drives or other media devices. In an interview with Ars Technica, Matthew Papakipos, the lead engineering director for the Chrome OS project, shared that Chrome OS will have a complete media player that approximates the functionality of Windows Media Player. ...

The most popular micro blogging network ‘Twitter’ has now added local trends support. This new feature allows users to track Trending topics on twitter related to their region. Though, currently very less number of countries and cities added to it. In twitter words: Local Trends will allow you to learn more about the nuances in our world and discover even more relevant topics that might matter to you. We’ll be improving this feature over time to provide more locations, languages, and data through our API. ...

Microsoft Corporation has almost started assembling the final build of Office 2010 aka (MS office 14) RTM version. As per the news leaked on Wzor, Development of OFFICE 2010 software package has come to its last stage.The build is codenamed as Escrow with build number 14.0.4734.1000 According to Wzor, This RTM Escrow Build 14.0.4734.1000 has already been circulated within Corporation and is available to company employees and partners. Few days before, when Build 14.0.4730.1007 was leaked on Torrent network, its EULA (License Agreement) read that its a RTM version but apparently it was just a Pre RTM build. Testers are still working on it and if there no problems, it will move to RTM version. ...

Adobe Flash is a well well known plugin used today by most of the internet users. Its next upgrade i.e version 10.1 will get private browsing support. Flash player will now automatically clean all flash history of your computer once you end the session. It will use the same technique as used in browsers supporting private browsing. As you end the session the browsers in private mode automatically clears cookies, history and data, similarly flash will also remove any user password, login information or data stored that were associated while working in flash environment. ...